[pilif]

The one big improvement happening in 9.3 is that synchronizing with a new master has become much easier. In earlier releases you had to more or less either use file based wal archive logging or you would have to rsync your whole data directory over, now the built-in replication protocol can handle this for you. We also got pg_standby now which is all you need to set up a new slave.

But yeah - if you need automatic failover and master election, you still need third-party tools. Some have had success with pgPool as a out-of-the-box solution (I haven't. I had severe reliability issues with pgPool. You might be more lucky), others produce their own scripts.

The process isn't complicated, it just requires you reading a lot of manpages and thinking ahead, but once you got the process down, postgres itself is reliable enough that its (admittedly limited) tools just work (which is a very good thing).

As long as Postgres doesn't do master-master replication, failover will always be a complicated topic to deal with.

[jeltz]

In 9.3 they also made failover faster.